The late Anthony Bourdain seemed to have the perfect life: a young daughter, money, and the kind of show that felt more like a vacation than actual work. The venerable chef traveled the world, to the most interesting cities, eating the best food those locations had to offer and rejoicing in the simplest pleasures of life. But that didn’t seem to be enough.
Morgan Neville’s “Roadrunner” isn’t necessarily an investigatory doc, it plays more as a celebration of Bourdain’s joie-de-vivre. For the first 90 minutes, it is infatuated with exploring Bourdain’s life; his early days as a chef, best-selling author, the two marriages that fell apart, his struggle at being a father, the political activism that would shape him, and, for most of that runtime, it’s a breeze to revel in the unadorned passion he brought to everything he did. The punk-rock-driven soundtrack, consisting mostly of Bourdain’s favorite songs, works as both a tribute and symphony to his own life.
There are also hints sprinkled throughout the film that Bourdain felt uneasy about himself, always having to find the next addiction to forget about his personal demons. There’s a revelatory anecdote, by one of his cameramen, who tells Neville that Anthony had “a lifelong addictive personality.” His cruxes went from being harmless (film, food, travelling) to damn-near deadly (heroine, binge-drinking, women).
In the last half hour, Neville tackles Bourdain’s untimely death. He was found dead in a French hotel in the summer of 2018. The cause was later confirmed to be suicide. That’s when the doc digs deep into his controversial relationship with Asia Argento, which many believe was one of the triggers that led him to take his own life. A day before Bourdain’s suicide, Argento was caught by paparazzi holding hands, and being more than a little chummy, with a French journalist in Rome.
Neville doesn’t fully adhere to the theory that Argento’s cheating may have had something to do with his suicide, but there are insinuations. As if Neville is saying “it’s hard to blame Argento for, the already unstable, Bourdain’s death, but she may have been a “trigger.” It’s the good old “it’s not her fault, but it kind of also is her fault” shortcoming.
The last portion of “Roadrunner” casts a major spell on the viewer. The rest of the doc mostly feels like a feature-length version of Bourdain’s CNN show “Parts Unknown.” It goes smoothly along, a harmless treatise on food, travelling and the free-spirited nature of its host. However, one does feel as though they may not have gotten Bourdain’s whole story in “Roadrunner.” Something feels off about the whole thing, as though it didn’t dig deep enough into the psyche of this troubled man and instead resorted to asking simple questions and consequentially came up with simple answers.
SCORE: B-